Professional Estimation
by Sister Coyote
Summary: Being a Turk gives you an interesting perspective on a lot of things. Mentions of torture; nothing explicit.


They weren't very good at torture, Elena thought contemptuously in between tides of agony.

The three silver-haired jerks were good at _pain_ (oh, very good) but they weren't good at torture. Not everybody knew that there was a difference, but she was a Turk, which gave you a crash course on Torture: Theory and Practice. And watching Reno operate was a lesson in itself. Several lessons. With full-color diagrams.

For one thing, they were getting too angry, especially the one with hair in his face. When they got angry, they forgot that the pain was supposed to be convincing her to cooperate. When pain got bad enough, it became counter-productive: beyond a certain point, she wasn't going to tell them anything because she couldn't think past the deafening klaxon of pain

(searing every nerve, rendering her mindless and useless, unable to fixate on anything, including what they were asking her)

and she was usually so worn out in between rounds that it was all she could do to get her breath back. Compared to Reno, they were exerting themselves quite a lot for little payoff; he didn't even usually have to _do_ that much to a target, but he was the master of terrifying little comments and long pauses to let their imaginations do the dirty work for him, and lots of down time during which they could spill all.

The big one was suggesting something to the long-haired one. She closed her eyes and hung onto her train of thought.

No, their technique was definitely not worth much, in her professional estimation. They couldn't play 'good cop, bad cop,' which was, while not the only effective way to actually get information out of someone you were torturing, certainly was one of the faster and easier ones. The best they seemed to be able to do was 'bad cop, crazy cop, creepy cop,' which wasn't at all the same thing. The problem with that . . .

. . . the world went white on a blaze of pain, and every cell rebelled at once, and she could hear herself screaming . . .

. . . the problem with that, she thought, gasping for breath, was that without a 'good cop' to confide in, you just hated them all. Hatred served as a shield: even if your noble principles went out the window after a few hours or days of torment, pure base loathing for your tormentors could still keep you from talking.

(She was generally Good Cop to Tseng's Bad Cop, because a lot of people believed that she would go easy on them because she was a girl, and she wasn't ashamed to play up the soft-voice-and-big-brown-eyes thing to encourage it. It was always fun to see the look on their faces when they realized that, while she was a blonde and a girl, she was also, more importantly, a _Turk_. Sometimes, too, they'd swap, and Tseng would play the reasonable one to her sadistic-bitch-queen, and that was awfully entertaining.)

And anyway, sometimes they overdid it—whether through frustration or just incompetence, Elena didn't know. Sometimes they overdid it, and she passed out from the pain, which defeated the whole _point_. Out cold, she wasn't much good to them.

No, Elena thought as the crazy one with hair in his face bent over her, this was agonizing, and probably would wind up killing her, but fundamentally they were amateurs. Something seared across her skin, and darkness splotched before her eyes, and she sank gratefully into unconsciousness.

***

Of course, the dangerous bit was the delirium. Even with relatively inept torturers, delirium was dangerous, because you could say anything. She was pretty sure she'd been half-hallucinating for several hours, but it was hard to tell what was hallucination and what was real.

("Hang on," said Rude. "Don't forget you're a Turk." She wondered what he was doing here.)

She was laughing, she could hear herself, but she wasn't sure why, and it was like listening to a recording of herself played through a thick layer of wool. Someone was saying her name, a little hoarse and very desperate, some way away.

("Don't let them get to you," Tseng said, and he sounded very cool and professional, that self-possessed tone that could still make her heart _race_ despite herself, and not at all like . . . like he had sounded the last time she had heard him.)

A low voice, strangely soft and very calm. "Just tell us where she is, and this will all be over. That will be better for both of you, won't it?" She couldn't make her eyes focus; darkness and glowing-white wove in and out of her vision. Her body felt like it had transmuted from a real and solid thing to an amorphous cloud of pure sensation, and every sensation was pain. She opened her mouth and tried to make her lips and tongue work.

("You're not going to let these _amateurs_ get you, are you?" Reno asked, his eyes slanted glittering green affectionate mockery that turned suddenly to mako-green glowing which threw her out of herself—)

— and she could tell suddenly what was real and what was not, and the coaxing cool voice scraped discord up her spine, and with the last voice she had, she said, "Fuck you, you bastard," to the long-haired man who hovered over her. His lip curled, and pain seared through her, but distantly she felt satisfaction as her vision greyed and blurred around the edges. She was dying, probably, but at least she hadn't given in.

_Don't forget you're a Turk._

_Like I ever could._

***

Much later, half a world away, she would cuff Reno on the shoulder and say, "Thank you."

"Yeah?" he would ask, crooking a half-smile. "What for?"

"Watching you in action set the bar really high for torture," she would reply. "These kids, they try, but it's just not the same."

He would look at her for a moment, disbelieving, and then he would laugh and laugh.


End file.
